Some years ago I joined a knowledge work automation software company partway through a refresh of their e-learning materials. The training already had a light fictional scenario running through it: one established character going through scenarios of using the product. My job was to help modernize the rest. I decided to run a little experiment and now it’s been long enough that I can come clean and confess.
One of the first things I suggested was small and mostly practical: give that lone character a regular, defined supporting cast. A recurring group of illustrated colleagues, each with their own role, makes examples easier to follow. Learners stop having to reorient themselves every module, as they already know who Marianne or Kimberly is, what she does, and which character has similar use cases as a specific type of professional. Consistency isn’t a mere style choice in instructional design; it’s a cognitive load issue. Fewer new faces means more attention left over for the actual content.
So I designed a cast. I built it off the company’s brand guide: colors, lineart, the general visual register they’d already established, and updated it twice more over the following years as the branding evolved. I chose illustration over stock photography deliberately. Drawings hold up better across a global training library: they age slower, they don’t carry the slightly stiff, staged quality that stock photo shoots almost always have, and they let a learner project onto a character rather than get distracted by wondering who the model actually is. Illustration is more forgiving, and it’s more engaging. People respond to drawn characters emotionally in a way they don’t to a stock photo of someone gesturing at a whiteboard.
Because the training would be seen by employees and clients on every continent, the cast needed to actually look like a global audience.
Here’s the part I want to talk about, though, because it’s the part nobody asked me to do and nobody would have noticed if I hadn’t: I made sure a Black male character and a Black female character with natural style hair were built into the cast, and I gave both of them senior seats. When someone in the scenario needed something explained to them, one of these two was usually the one explaining it with a flipboard, or at minimum, they were drawn the way the “successful person” archetype gets drawn in this kind of material: sharp suits, boarding a flight, using gadgets to work on the go.
I didn’t write this into a creative brief, nor did I really flag it in a review meeting. There was no line item that said “ensure minority characters are cast in leadership roles”. I just made the characters that way, told my colleagues this character is meant for such and such user role, and moved on to the next task. The company wasn’t, and to my knowledge still isn’t, one that runs Juneteenth campaigns or puts out a DEI newsletter. This wasn’t a values initiative from leadership. It was a design decision, made once, by one illustrator, that then propagated across every course built on that character library.
Those training modules get run by thousands of employees yearly in many, many, many countries. None of them are told anything about the reasoning behind the cast. They’re just absorbing, module after module, an environment where the person explaining the harder concept, the person who’s clearly good at their job, happens to be Black. Nobody claps for it. Nobody’s supposed to notice it as a statement, because it isn’t styled as one. It’s just the wallpaper of how competence gets depicted in that company’s training library now, and it will keep being the wallpaper as long as the character cast stays in use.
I think there’s a version of representation work that only counts if it’s legible as representation work with statements, a campaign, or a badge on the module’s title slide. That version has its place, sure, although it often comes across as hokey and even annoying. But there’s another version that just lives in the choices a designer makes when nobody’s checking: who gets the suit, who gets to be the one with the answer, who gets drawn as the default competent adult in the room. That version doesn’t need permission from a brand strategy, and it doesn’t need an audience to know it happened. It just needs someone at the drawing stage who decided it mattered.
That’s the version I’d rather keep doing. Quietly structurally embedded instead of a big message about inclusion that ends up causing all sorts of needless hyperventilation and back-and-forth. I believe we didn’t get a single user complaint about the inclusivity of those training materials. There was no campaign to decry the company as ‘woke’. The training materials’ user review scores did increase compared to the previous materials, but that’s more due to our team building them to be more engaging and generally enjoyable than the old ones.